The demand for fully cooked meat and poultry items continues to increase with the ever-increasing consumer need for convenience. It is important that food processors deliver food items to the market that are safe to consume. One parameter that significantly ensures that the food items are free of pathogens is to process them to a predetermined temperature. Sometimes the cook temperatures are mandated by regulations. For example, in the United States, the U.S.D.A. prescribes the legal minimum temperatures for the major food categories. Food processors attempt to carry out these prescribed legal guidelines, however, in most situations, the food items are overcooked above the legal minimum temperature to ensure that the delivered food items are safe. Consequently, significant additional processing costs are incurred by over cooking, which are passed down to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Presently, operators manually measure the temperature of food items being processed with hand-held digital thermometers. These measurements are taken for only a few food items at somewhat regular intervals. The measurements are used to manually make adjustments to the cooking or other process. Even among skilled personnel, the measurement and control of temperature is an art. There is a high turnover of personnel in these plants, making it extremely difficult to have an adequately trained staff on a permanent basis. This can produce considerable variation in measurements, resulting inevitably in inconsistent results for the various batches of food items being processed.
An important concern when measuring the temperature of food items is that every item be exposed to the required minimum temperature. One cannot be certain that the items that are not measured are, in fact, within the prescribed legal guidelines. This is particularly true for irregular-shaped food items having variation in size, including thickness.
Product recalls can be traced to under-processed food items. Some recalls suggest product overlapping as one condition that leads to the under-processing of food items. Overlapping occurs as a result of the food processor's strong desire to maximize belt loading. When overlapping is present, the interface between the portions of food, such as meat, acts as additional resistance to heat transfer which, under some circumstances, behaves as an insulator. Consequently, the meat or other food trapped underneath this thermal barrier can see significantly lower temperatures.
Accordingly, there is a need for developing systems and methods that can improve the consistency with which food items are thermally processed by providing for the automated measurement of the temperature of food items. Additionally, the problems of overlapping and needless over-processing are addressed with apparatus and methods of the present invention, achieving a higher confidence that no food items pass under-processed.